Appearance of Jiangsu Xinshi Membrane Technology Company (Photo by Sun Yang)

Jiangsu Xinshi Membrane Technology Co., Ltd. mainly produces hollow plate ceramic membrane, ceramic flat membrane MBR components, ceramic flat membrane integrated MBR sewage treatment devices, which are used in municipal domestic sewage, industrial wastewater, seawater desalination, water purification, and food industry, Petrochemical industry, biomedicine, environmental protection and energy, reclaimed water reuse, zero discharge of industrial wastewater, reverse osmosis pretreatment and other water treatment fields.

All along, the company adopts the Product Manufacturing Execution System (MES) to monitor the production process data in the workshop in real time, systematically collect the data of key processes and key equipment and the production process, and grasp the production data of each process and batch in each process station in real time. For example, the temperature and humidity data, start time and end time of stirring and aging processes; The equipment status, working time and production quantity of stirring, extrusion, microwave baking and laminating spray gun process; The configuration data collection of kiln, the laminating air pressure and the detection data of sheet deformation shall be reformed twice and the instruments shall be added for data collection. In the whole process flow, each process collects data on the product process quality, record the production batch, product serial number and the number of unqualified products, and display the production process information of the day in time through the workshop production kanban, and remind the abnormal situation in time. At the same time, it can trace materials, processes and quality, and realize the digital management of the whole process of planning, production and operation.

The MES system also implements scheduling management of production plans. According to the completion date of the production plan and the standard working hours of each process, the large production plan is refined into the production tasks of each process every day in the system. The production site carries out production according to the formulated production plan and corresponding sub-tasks. Through the planning and scheduling, the most reasonable allocation of resources, balanced and orderly production progress, improvement of production capacity and reduction of resource waste are realized. You can also manually adjust the production plan and strategy, adjust the work order task, emergency order and other abnormal scheduling, to ensure the rapid processing of customer orders.

Chinese and foreign customers visit the optical inspection area of ceramic film (photo by Cao Chao)

Cao Chao, general manager of the company, further elaborated that the previous measurement process of the "extrusion process" consisted of two to three people, and random sampling of the width and thickness of the cut units was carried out, which not only had problems such as heavy workload, easy forgetting, conflicting steps, inaccurate measurement, etc. Through intelligent transformation, the size of the product is automatically detected, and if it does not meet the standard, it will be warned immediately.

The previous "lamp inspection process" used to install LED light sources, confirm whether there are impurities or surface defects in the ceramic film by observing the perspective image, and then manually check the flatness of the ceramic film in the XYZ direction. In this way, at least 2 people will inspect it, and the period cannot stop. Through the automatic transformation, the introduction of visual inspection and automatic sorting system, automatic product quality inspection, every 8 seconds to test a piece of ceramic film, once the emergence of defective products when the system will automatically alarm.

The "laminating process" after MES system is adopted, and the font pattern is used to identify the production batch and product serial number. After each process is completed, the production personnel will report the production on the online edge flat plate. After the process is completed, the process of process completion will be displayed, and the report information will be synchronized. The visual inspection system automatically recognizes the font pattern of the detected product to record the product information, thus realizing the traceability of the production process and quality of the product information. It can also record the energy consumption of high-energy-consuming equipment by using smart meters, and carry out intelligent and information-based control of energy consumption to ensure the safe and optimized operation of the energy consumption monitoring supply link and reduce operation and maintenance costs.

Visit the ceramic film extrusion molding area (photo by Cao Chao)

In the aspect of intelligent management and control of the workshop environment, the collected relevant data are updated to the environmental online monitoring system in real time through industrial-grade sensor components and computing chips, and the visualization and data analysis of relevant detection indicators are further completed to ensure the stability and accuracy of the equipment and the stability of the workshop environment. In terms of safety production management level, safety production management is realized through EHS module in MES system, on-site safety risk assessment and recording are carried out regularly, rectification and tracking are carried out for abnormal items, abnormal records are regularly summarized and analyzed, and on-site safety hidden danger points are improved, so as to achieve safe production and improve on-site management level.

The product data management system (PDM) established by the company enables the product research and development design to process management, design change, after-sales maintenance and other links to realize the data management of the whole life cycle and achieve the effect of integrated application. The established enterprise resource planning management system (ERP) tracks and traces the product production date, team and other information to realize the optimization of supply chain, logistics, cost and other enterprise management; the construction of the energy storage system (WMS) to grasp the inventory status in a timely manner, to maintain the minimum inventory, to avoid the backlog of funds.

Intelligent ceramic membrane mixing extrusion molding area (photo by Sun Yang)

At present, the company's production workshop realizes the business coordination and real-time information sharing of the whole process through the comprehensive integration of various application platforms. Through the establishment of a good coordination mechanism between ERP system, MES system, WMS system, PDM system, ceramic membrane workshop data acquisition and SCADA system, production equipment, logistics equipment and testing equipment, the goals of reducing staff and increasing efficiency, saving land and reducing inventory and increasing efficiency are realized, seamless integration between information systems, information systems and physical equipment, to achieve the product production process of full tracking and control functions, overall to achieve efficient, reliable, controllable production purposes, improve the management level of enterprises.

Cao Chao used a set of data to illustrate the company's concrete achievements in the transformation of intelligence to data: intelligent and digital production has shortened the production cycle of each batch of goods from 22 days to 16 days; Reduce the collection and input time of various basic data such as supply, production and sales by more than 2 hours per day, and save 44 working hours per month. Reduce the occupation of semi-finished products in production workshops by more than 1.6 million yuan; reduce the time of material guidance and circulation in the workshop by more than 6 days per month; The accuracy rate of information data such as workshop logistics, quality, working hours and equipment operation reaches more than 99.9.

Cao Chao said that because the company has made a lot of profits in the transformation of intelligence, it will form a stable enterprise product database in the future to improve the excellent rate of products. Continue to carry out intelligent equipment transformation to further reduce labor and improve work efficiency. (Luan Luan)